Media Should Count the Local Costs of War

The news media could do a much better job of helping us to understand the costs of war.

For this column, anyway, I'll set aside the horrendous toll that war takes in terms of death, physical injuries and human grief. Instead, let's focus on financial consequences when $2 billion of taxpayer money goes toward U.S. military expenditures every day.

The financial burdens of the warfare state are ones we shoulder in silence, with little media coverage or political comment. Yet it would be informative to become acquainted with the figures that apply close to home — especially in light of what that money could have done for our own cash-strapped communities.

In urban communities around the country, the war effort has already secured more than enough federal tax dollars from residents to provide complete health care for everyone in the city for an entire year.

Statewide, in California, taxpayers have anted up more than $66 billion to directly pay for the war in Iraq. Even the California state government's whopping budget deficit of $15 billion seems almost small in comparison.

Taxpayers who live in the state of New York have already paid more than $47.1 billion to the IRS to help fund the Iraq War.

So far, even little Rhode Island has provided the U.S. Treasury a total of $2.1 billion in tax revenues for the war.

The financial costs of war are measured in astronomical numbers, while localities scramble — and, increasingly, fail — to make ends meet for basic services. While looking at budget tradeoffs, we're accustomed to separating military and domestic priorities. Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom is that state and local governments must keep hacking away at already bare-bones budgets.

Whether we notice it or not, federal budget priorities are hitting us hard at home.

And while we usually don't hear much about the tax-dollar tradeoffs between waging war overseas and meeting human needs at home, specific information is readily available.

It's not hard for journalists — or anyone else — to get hold of such figures. One of the most accessible sources is the nonpartisan National Priorities Project, which has a user-friendly number-crunching Web site at www.nationalpriorities.org.

Failure to fulfill health care as a human right in our own communities is due to many factors, but surely the nation's massive — and escalating — military budget is a huge one. Local officeholders and local journalists may adhere to the customary view of events in Washington as outside their purview, but the decisions made in the nation's capital are casting a gargantuan shadow over what is possible at home.

The useful distinctions between national political issues and local governance have shrunk almost to the vanishing point. We live in concentric realms of budget priorities and their human effects. At the core are our values as a society — not the platitudes of clergy or pundits or politicians, but the realities of what we are willing to sustain.

We need to keep taking a fresh look. Yet the vantage points on these matters offered by news media are routinely stale. We've become acculturated, and inured, to the steady drip-drip of priorities that have run amuck. It doesn't have to be this way. And journalists should be helping us to consider the key facts and engage in democratic debate.

There's nothing particularly natural about spending vast sums for war while providing woefully inadequate resources for health care. As a society, we can face up to the human consequences of such priorities — and make more conscious choices. The news media should provide us with the information we need to fully engage in that process.

Norman Solomon's books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." A documentary film of the same name, based on the book, has been released on home video.

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